• Your growth has hit a wall due to a global calamity
• You have no one to talk to about questions on your growth strategy
• You have some great ideas but you aren’t sure of how to execute them
• You’re frustrated and you need to hear a fresh perspective

Every business has its unique challenges. One size doesn’t fit all. Be it marketing challenges or doubts on your business model or the techniques and tools needed to resolve a complex situation or questions on how to achieve and sustain growth. Who does one turn to? Here’s where a digital marketing mentor comes into play for an organization on a rollercoaster ride and one that wants to stay ahead of the game.

If there’s any industry that is beneficial for business growth, its digital marketing. Any growing business today has to have a presence online and being online enables a business to maintain real-time communication with its consumers, and the more real-time the communication, the higher chances of instilling customer loyalty and gaining valuable feedback on your business strategies, products, and services.

In such a fast-paced environment, as a Manager and Mentor to your team members, your responsibility is to approach every individual’s situation uniquely and with alacrity. One size doesn’t fit all. Remember that you will be their trusted advisor. You play two roles but with one single aim in mind…and that is to steer your ‘ship’ to high performance while still making sure that you gain your team’s trust and retain your best employees.

Here are few points to keep in mind:

• What kind of expectations will you set?
• How will you communicate with your employee that he/she has achieved success?
• How will you segment your employee’s development phases and how will you get him/her to achieve success?
• Understand your employee’s personal side- it contributes greatly to his/her overall performance
• Be an active listener/ know when to hit ‘pause’
• Don’t assume you know his/her working style
• Be candid about sharing your failures and setbacks
• Celebrate achievements
• Be open to introducing your mentee to projects or connections that will help them grow
• Solve situations for the long term
• Give them ownership, even if they outshine you at the workplace
• Be accountable for your mentee
• Provide a vision
• Learn from your mentee…it’s a two-way process

Mentoring is typically a long-term partnership between the mentee and mentor, focused on long term career development or career advice. A mentor’s role is to open up possible avenues to driving your digital marketing campaign in the right direction, make connections, and introduce the mentee to new experiences or approaches.

As a Manager leading your team to success, you are in the best position to be their Mentor. You know your business well and you also know the aspirations and work styles of your team members. You can monitor your team’s performance frequently irrespective of when the performance cycle is. This way you can keep giving them feedback and suggestions on how to improve and better their performance so by the time they reach the formal end of the performance cycle they have gained some valuable feedback and have plugged all the gaps. It’s a perfect recipe for high performance and something that should be followed on a long-term basis to build and retain committed teams.

A great benefit of being a mentor to your team is the huge learning you will receive from your mentee. And for a Manager to take on this role is to strike gold, as you know your team’s capabilities, you know their working styles, you know the vision for your business. All this combined together is sure to hit the jackpot.

Digital Marketing is the profession of the future and the industry needs the best of the best to steer it on.